Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,677

This is the grave of Allen Ellender.

Born in 1890 in Montegut (what a name!), Louisiana, Ellender grew up in a Catholic family, went to Catholic schools, and then St. Aloysius College. He got a law degree from Tulane in 1913 and started a law practice it the town of Houma. He really wanted to join the military in World War I. The military didn’t want to take him because of a kidney stone (really?). But he persisted. He got surgery to remove the stone (what that looked like in 1913 I’d rather not contemplate) and then got his congressmen to advocate for him. The military still didn’t want the guy fighting, but he was offered a translation role. However, he declined that, saying correctly that he spoke Louisiana French, not France French. Seems reasonable. He took classes to improve his French and started in the Student Army Training Corps at Tulane. The war ended before he got to France. The reason to go into this much detail is that when Ellender became a politician, he really wanted to claim that he fought in the war and he wanted official discharge papers and used his power to lobby for them, but never did get them. Still, he basically lied about his military career for his whole life.

After the war, Ellender went into politics. I don’t have to tell you that he was a Democrat. This was 1920s Louisiana. He won election to the state legislature in 1924 and he soon became an ally of Huey Long. He led the anti-impeachment forces when others tried to get rid of Long and then he used that to raise himself into becoming Speaker of the House in the state legislature in 1932. In 1935, Huey Long was assassinated. By that time, the Kingfish was in the Senate. The primary to replace him went to the governor, Oscar Allen, but then he proceeded to drop dead before the general election in 1936. So Ellender got the nod to replace him on the ballot and of course won the election.

Ellender spent the rest of his life in the Senate. The South never has been about replacing senators much, which goes far to explain the region’s historical power in Congress. He was the mixed bag of the southern liberal–excellent on economic and social policy and absolutely horrible on race. In fact, he was a big supporter of Roosevelt’s courtpacking plan. The bill to create a free lunch plan for schools also owed a lot to Ellender. He really did want to help the poor.

The problem of course is that a lot of the poor were Black kids and he didn’t do so well walking that line. In 1946, Theodore Bilbo won reelection in Mississippi based on the worst kind of race baiting you can imagine. The Senate investigated what had happened, especially the violence and voter suppression. Ellender got the job to head the investigation and basically ran a massive smokescreen for Bilbo, saying that this was just tradition in the South, as if that was OK. Moreover, it was all for naught as Bilbo was sick and soon died before taking his seat again. Ugh.

On the other hand, Ellender really hated Joe McCarthy and thought him a demagogue and a clown. He also headed the Agriculture Committee from 1951 to 1971, except for the two years in the 50s that Republicans had the majority in the Senate. That’s a very powerful committee on issues that most people find kind of boring, which in fact matter to a lot of people. There was nothing Ellender would not do for the sugar interests in this role. Ellender also was a pretty early opponent to escalation in the Vietnam War. Beginning in the 1950s, he began to suspect that the foreign policy establishment overstated the Soviet threat in order to up defense funding. He recognized the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and said the U.S. had no business getting involved in a civil war. He played an important role in creating the food stamp program as well.

But still, you can be the best kind of midcentury southern liberal possible and still be just completely awful on race. That was Ellender. There were southern liberals who at least kind of tried to walk a line, someone like William Fulbright for instance. Not Ellender. He was just a racist as Bilbo or anyone other horrible person you can think of. He worked hard to block anti-lynching legislation, a practice which he evidently had no problem in approving, He hated all the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Opposing an anti-lynching bill in 1937, which happened after a particularly brutal lynching of two Black men in Mississippi, he stated, “We shall at all cost preserve the white supremacy of America.” He never left the position. For some reason, he took a tour of east Africa in 1962, at the moment when African nations were throwing off their colonial chains. He stated to a reporter that he did not believe these people could govern themselves without whites leading them.

Ellender believed that the problem with American race relations was northern whites moving South and stirring up the colored folk. Even worse was southern Blacks moving North and then returning South. Before that, they knew their place and now that northerners were interfering, southern whites had to keep them under control. He once stated, “A southern negro is polite by instinct, but when he comes up north he gets sassy as a flea, and with that condition trouble follows.” He also would put on the condescending act. Speaking on the Senate floor, he stated, “We of the South treat colored people well; we love them; but we do not associate with them on the same social basis.” He found the soft Civil Rights Act of 1957 unfortunate, but figured it would not really do anything, which was what made people like himself and his ally in unhinged white supremacy Sam Ervin feel OK about it.

In 1972, while campaigning for reelection, Ellender had a heart attack and died. He was 81 years old.

Also, I’m not sure if this link works, but if you go to Google Books, you can find Allen Ellender’s shrimp and crab gumbo. It is in Ken Wells’ Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou. Now I am hungry, in spite of the recipe’s author being a racist.

Allen Ellender is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Houma, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1936, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. J. Hamilton Lewis is in Brentwood, Maryland, despite being a senator from Illinois. James Murray, a largely unknown figure today but who was a major promoter of labor issues, is in Butte, Montana. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.